Debian Weekly News - August 9th, 2000

Welcome to Debian Weekly News, a newsletter for the Debian community.

Debian will be awarded the $25,000 IDG/Linus Torvalds Community
Award at LinuxWorld Conference and Expo. Here's the
full announcement. This should happen roughly at the same time Debian
2.2 is released, and a release party of some sort is planned to happen
during LinuxWorld, which is shaping up to be an eventful show for Debian.

A release announcement is being prepared. A lot of
brainstorming has been going on as we try to find and remember
important changes in potato that we can brag about, and several rough
drafts have already been written.

Members of the #debian irc channel on irc.debian.org are preparing for the
onslaught of questions when Debian 2.2 is released. They're
organising a round-the-clock support crew dubbed the
"Mobile Array of Support Helpers for Potato (MashPotato)" that will
"provide the most comprehensive Debian GNU/Linux support service that
we can to users both new and old."

This week's security fixes include a
fix for a hole
in unstable's mailman package that allowed local users to take over the
list user, and a
security fix for ntop that fixes that program's web mode so it cannot be
used to view every file on the system.
A security hole in mailx and suidperl is the big security hole of the week,
but Debian
narrowly escaped being vulnerable.

More news from Debian-derived distributions.
Storm Linux 2000 Starter Edition has been released. Interestingly,
their
press
release says it is "built around the Debian GNU/Linux 2.2 "potato"
release, the most stable and secure distribution available", even though
2.2 is not yet released. Also, another Debian-based distribution has
shown up: DemoLinux 2.0 is now
Debian
based. And finally, any Corel users who want to upgrade to potato can
check out this Corel to Debian micro-howto.

New packages in Debian unstable this week include the following and
15 more: